A new movie by producer and director Timur Bekmambetov called "Search," will first be released in the US and then in Russia

Timur Bekmambetov

MOSCOW, April 9. /TASS/. A new movie by producer and director Timur Bekmambetov called "Search," will first be released in the US and then in Russia, the director told TASS on Monday in an interview. The film will focus on how unprotected people have become in the digital world.

According to Bekmambetov, the flick, created by an international team will "open up in America in August," the Russian premier will depend on the Sony distributor, and will take place in August or maybe even later. The picture has already received two awards at the Sundance Independent Film Festival.

"It is a mystery film, a touching story of a father who first lost his wife and then his daughter disappears," the producer said. "And he [the father] uses her computer to start his own investigation." The father realizes that he had lost his daughter a long time ago, she’s had been living her own life.

"This movie is about the fears that the digital world gives us," explained Bekmambetov. "We are not protected and we don’t know how to communicate with each other."

The film was created in a producer-invented format known as "screen-life" (the action takes place only on the computer screen - TASS). "We have already produced four films like this. The first one Unfriended grossed at $67 million at the box office, while we spent less than a million on it."

Destructive power of social networks

According to the producer, "it is obvious that the audience is very interested in this world, because they live in it." Similarly, Bekmambetov noted he knows "many very talented people, for example, Yevgeniy Mironov [Russian actor, head of Theater of Nations] who protect themselves from it." Bekmambetov admitted that, "of course, the destructive power of social networks is enormous for [anyone’s] psyche."

"But we, filmmakers, work with human destinies, characters, souls, we need to study and talk about how we behave on the screen," says Bekmambetov. "Without this, it is simply impossible to talk about a contemporary person."

The producer also noted that based on his observations the number of people who have social network accounts is swelling. "There are about 10% on Facebook, and the rest are in VKontakte," Bekmambetov stated. "Practically nobody is not ‘plugged in’ anywhere, to be exact, their numbers are catastrophically decreasing day by day."